Rick Elice proves you don’t have to be fixated on a subject to write about it successfully.

Peter and the Starcatchers, his prequel to Peter Pan, won five Tony Awards, more than any other show in 2012, and brought Elice a nomination for best play. The national tour comes to the Lexus Broadway Series this week.

Dallas theatergoers know that this is the second show about the famous boy who never grew up to hit the AT&T Performing Arts Center within only a few months. The Dallas Theater Center presented the world premiere of the musical Fly, a treatment of the old tale with a contemporary edge, at the Wyly Theatre this summer.

Fly producer Jeffrey Seller and playwright Rajiv Joseph both admitted to a lifelong fascination with J.M. Barrie’s character and story. Joseph even brought to an interview a stack of recordings of musical versions he had collected as a child.

Elice, previously best known as the co-librettist of the blockbuster hit Jersey Boys, had no such history.

“I confess I did not,” the writer says. “I remember seeing the play with Mary Martin when I was a child, but I was not a devotee.”

His recruitment as the author of the show came indirectly.

Suspense novelist Ridley Pearson began the whole thing by telling bedtime stories to his 8-year-old daughter who wanted to go to Disneyland. Then he and humorist Dave Barry started swapping chapters via email. The result was the best-selling children’s book Peter and the Starcatchers. The enterprise has since grown into a lucrative series, but the stage version was inspired by the first of them.

While working at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Elice’s life partner, Roger Rees, and fellow director Alex Timbers (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) decided they wanted to make a theatrical adaptation of the children’s novel. Rees had starred in the title role of the legendary Dickens adaptation The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby in 1981. The two directors thought a similar storytelling approach, in which the actors step in and out of roles, might work well for the play they wanted to create.

“At some point, they needed a script,” Elice recalls. “As a friend of the court, I wrote some words. It was fun to create an adult play about childhood and to create dialogue for this rangy, picaresque children’s novel.”

Besides the Pearson and Barry story, Elice went back and read the original Barrie play.

“Roger and Alex allowed me to include and exclude what I wanted,” he says. “I added laughs — mixing high comedy, low humor plus some contemporary references — as Barrie himself had. It worked out rather well. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

The story involves a boy who is literally afraid of his own shadow. The pirate who later becomes Captain Hook was played on Broadway by Christian Borle, taking time off from his role as the composer on TV’s Smash. There’s also a girl named Molly, who is more or less the hero of the plot.

When told that the Wendy in Fly is also a heroic sort and the main character, Elice responds naughtily, “I wonder where they got that idea?”

Although Peter and the Starcatcher is not a musical, it boasts enough music that the score by Wayne Barker was nominated for a Tony in its own right.

“I thought it might be a lot of fun to have a patter song in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan from 11 men in mermaid drag,” Elice quips.

While bringing this new show to Broadway and preparing the national tour over the last couple of years, Elice also co-wrote the screenplay for a film version of Jersey Boys with playwright John Logan (Red). Clint Eastwood is directing a cast that includes actors who played the Four Seasons in the stage version of the show, rather than more famous movie stars.

Elice’s first love, however, remains the stage.

“Everything I’ve always loved about the theater is in this play,” he says. “I can’t imagine how sad my life would be if I had turned down this thing.”

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About Lawson Taitte

Lawson has been writing about Texas theater since 1974, when he started writing for Texas Monthly. He was its statewide theater, music and dining critic during the magazine's early years. After that, he wrote for D Magazine, doing two stints as its dining critic, and frequently contributed the New York Times Book Review. He also had his own program, "Critic at Large," on WRR-FM from 1984 to 1992 and did critiques and interviews about all the arts, from dance and visual arts to movies. (He covered the Dallas gallery scene and the local classical scene more thoroughly than anybody else in those years, and was a founding member of the Dallas Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum.) He came to the Morning News in 1992 and became theater critic in 1996.

Hometown: Harlingen, TX

Education: Lawson has a B.A. from Rice University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University (on a theater-related topic), and edited nearly 20 annual volumes of the Andrew R. Cecil Lectures on Moral Values in a Free Society at the University of Texas at Dallas.